As is well known in the art, biometric features currently used for authentication purposes in a biometric authentication system include fingerprints, facial patterns, voice patterns, hand measurements, eye retinas and irises, vein patterns and the like, and researches and studies on each of these features have been actively conducted.
In recent years, biometric authentication has been adopted for portable electronic devices such as smartphones and the like, and fingerprint authentication has been widely adopted among various types of biometric authentication for such portable electronic devices. The fingerprint authentication has advantages of high security level and usability compared to other biometric authentication techniques.
However, a fingerprint sensor installed in the portable electronic device such as smartphones is very small in size due to cost savings and space limitations, and therefore, only a very small portion of a fingerprint may be inputted at a time.
As the fingerprint sensor becomes smaller, the size of the fingerprint images captured for authentication purpose and registration purpose also becomes smaller, so that the amount of fingerprint information is also reduced. Further, a portion of the fingerprint inputted when registering in advance the fingerprint data for authentication procedure and a portion of the fingerprint inputted when the authentication is requested may be completely different from each other. Thus, it may often occur in practice that a fingerprint overlap area does not exist.
Particularly, the use of such a small-size fingerprint sensor may lead to an undesirably high false rejection rate (FRR). In order to prevent the increase of the false rejection rate in measuring and sensing such a small-size fingerprint at the time of authentication, a plurality of fingerprint data for different parts of an entire fingerprint are registered and stored in multiple times when registering in advance the fingerprint data to be used in the authentication procedure.
When a large number of fingerprint data are registered in advance and used for the authentication procedure, authentication performance may be improved. However, this may also increase an authentication processing time, which is problematic. Although improving a performance of a central processing unit (CPU) such as an application processor (AP) of the smartphone may reduce the increase of the authentication processing time, this leads to an increase of a manufacturing cost.
Reference Document: Korean Patent No. 0846403
In view of the above, the present disclosure provides a method and a device for fingerprint authentication, which are capable of rapidly and quickly selecting appropriate and optimal reference comparison data among a plurality of partial fingerprint registration data registered in advance when an authentication is performed on partial fingerprint measurement data measured for a part of the entire fingerprint area.
However, aspects of the present disclosure are not restricted to those set forth herein. The above and other aspects of the present disclosure will become more apparent to one of ordinary skill in the art to which the present disclosure pertains by referencing the detailed description of the present disclosure given below.